Is Facebook Changing Our Identity?
>> MIKE: Here’s an idea: Without Facebook you might not know who you are. theme Since we’re pretty confident you already know what Facebook is, we’re gunna spend this part of the episode looking at photos from my recent trip to Portland. What you might not know, though, is how big Facebook really is. As of a few months ago, the social media monolith had over nine hundred and fifty-five million worldwide users. And of those, five hundred and fifty-two million of them are active daily. ding For comparison, that is roughly the populations of the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Italy combined. And not one of them knows what poking does. All of these people are uploading two hundred and fifty million photos a day, clicking the Like button two point seven billion times and playing Words With Friends instead of filing those TPS Reports. Get back to work. Facebook is for connecting with your friends, letting people know what you’re up to and creeping on your pals like a creepin’ creepo. Oh, and also using Timeline to create an imageified, alternate, digital version of yourself thus offloading the less pleasant parts of tending to your own memories. Making memories used to be really hard. It involved pens and paper and the postal service and scrap books and buying film and developing film and family photo albums and keeping all of this stuff somewhere in the house, like in a trunk or the attic or something, it was just the worst. And because these things are physical, on top of having to put them somewhere, you could only share them with a limited number of people at one time, but even though it makes it easier to do, Facebook didn’t invent conspicuous consumption, self documentation or the act of sharing heinously boring vacation photo albums. Don Draper invented that. Draper: “It’s called a carousel.” People have always loved to advertise what they have, where they’ve been and who they know because these things are a very, very big part of our identity construction. The clothes we buy, the music we listen to, the car we drive, our hairdo, our beard… trimming regimen. These objects and preferences perform a signification. A punk rocker advertised his culture with a mohawk and a businessman with a very expensive watch. Or a fancy vacation. Which he’d probably really like to remember. And why would he like to remember his fourteen day sojourn to Monte Carlo? Philosopher John Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity states that it’s because we tend to construct our idea of ourselves, our own identity, based upon what we know and remember of our past experiences. Things which we can’t or don’t remember, then, are not part of our identity. But here’s the thing: Facebook does all of this memory and identity construction stuff and it sort of does it a whole lot better. And to a degree of dissemination that was impossible before the internet. It’s tough to say, and estimates vary depending upon who you ask, but the average human brain can hold somewhere between one and ten terabytes of data. Facebook does more than that in photos every hour. And it does it better. Well… better. Actually, yeah, better, no air quote fingers better, just better. I mean, our memories are actually pretty bad. Think about it, if iPhoto had to stop and be like, “Um, yeah, give me a second,” every time you asked for those photos from the Grand Canyon, and then gave you this blurry mess, where like some of the colors are wrong and your friend Dave was there, even though he was visiting his mom in Cleveland that week, you’d be pretty miffed. Facebook is doing for your memories what Google did for simple facts, lyrics to songs and the casts of movies. Which is cool because like Jeff Goldblum and his closet of all the same suits in The Fly, you can use those brain parts for other stuff. Like Adventure Time quotes or ukelele songs or both. the ukelele and singing theme of Adventure Time: “Adventure Time, Come on and grab your friends…” But here’s the other thing, Timeline and photo albums and friend groups and all the other memory sorting goodies give you so many opportunities for broadcasting and constructing yourself. For instance: it’s thought that people can maintain between one and two hundred regular, persistently social relationships. Now, this includes everyone from your closest friends to people you see semi regularly, like maybe the friendly guy who sells you a bagel every Tuesday morning. This number, called Dunbar’s Number, named after anthropologist Robin Dunbar, describes your brain’s cognitive friend limit. Facebook’s technological friend limit is five thousand. Which is over thirty-three times the average Dunbar Number of one fifty. So when you’re uploading photos or telling stories or putting things on Timeline from before Facebook even existed, you’re doing it for yourself but then also for a group of people potentially much larger than the number you could possibly know. People look down on the photos of children, status updates and this story of your life business, essentially memory sharing, as stuff people don’t care about or oversharing or sometimes even dishonesty, but new ways of writing and communication are weird and scary. And this one bridges the particularly awkward gap between the personal diary and public performance of self. Which makes it weirdly both trivial and important. Maybe not important to you but definitely to at least one person: the person who put it on Facebook hoping to advertise a specific idea, opinion, event or who knows what else. Or maybe more significantly, create a browsable, digital self that they can use to gain a clearer understanding of where they’ve been and therefore who they are. ding What do you guys think? Is Facebook useful as a memory surrogate? Let us know in the comments and if you need help remembering to watch our videos, you could always just subscribe. honking Let me tell you about comments about Homestuck. Let’s see what you guys had to say about last week’s episode. GrayderFox, you were not kiddin’. rots28 says that he experiences some effort justification everytime he watches a film by Jean-Luc Godard. To which I respond: really? I could watch Masculine, Feminine like a million times, but that probably makes me a liberal arts unicorn. DementedStudios9007 wants to know who my favorite Homestuck character is… It’s Dave. It was Rose, now it’s Dave. Kevansevans and vanny0jae point out that Homestuck could actually lose a fair amount of it’s complication if you have been following it as it’s been created not coming into it at the end with five thousand plus pages. Uh, which is true, but it also has a lot of complicated time business, complicated plot business, tons of characters so parts of it are still legitimately complicated. tamral31 points out some epically long fan fiction while dread max points out Inception as an example of really complex cinema and this really causes an interesting comparison between pieces of media that are needlessly complicated and needfully complicated and I wonder which of those two examples falls into each of those designations. MrXarlable I have a response to your question, just not right now, so keep your eyes out. AutismPersonified points out that very complicated writing can sometimes be trimmed down to something friendlier and this reminds me of what I think is Jonathan Franzen’s first rule of novel writing, which is the audience is not the enemy. Franzen could maybe take a little of his own medicine but it is still a very valid point. To bjwaters, I’ve given your comment much consideration and to it I respond that that is just, like, your opinion, man. Ybarchov21, what did I say?! No spoilers. Gah. Biz Gotye, who has an awesome username, makes a point about people lording their accomplishments of having read Ulysses over other people which I can say as a person who has done it that it happens and you shouldn’t do it. Well, thank you so much. I mean, it’s not, it’s not really us, it’s our awesome subscribers. But thank you for the compliment. Um, my name is Mike, by the way. It’s nice to meet you… Julius Cesar. theme Category:Complete Category:English